Egit has its own way to handle this, which might be overriding your config setting. Either that or jgit doesn't support this configuration option yet -- that situation came up earlier with merge.ff.

The egit preference can be set from Team -> Remote -> Configure Push to Upstream... The default is to push everything, I think. You can restrict it to 'master', or whatever specific branches you prefer, in the dialog that will pop up. Similarly for fetch, via and Team -> Remote -> Configure Fetch from UpStream... I don't know if either of these supports 'current'.